Untitled by Jason Shinder

Untitled
Jason Shinder

If there is no cure, I still want to correct a few things

and think mostly of people, and have them all alive.
I want a door opening in me that I can enter

and feel the clarity of evening and the stars beginning.

One after another, I want my mistakes returning
and to approach them on a beach like a man

for whom there is no division between one way or another.

My most faithful body, you are not in the best of shape,
far from the glitter of the river in which you once swam.

But I want good tears when I stand on the street

and, from the sky, drifts down the finest mist on my face.
Not everything is given and it should not permit sadness.

Let me
Let me keep on describing things to be sure they happened.

SELECTED BY MATTHEW SIEGEL

This Jason Shinder poem vibrates with life, even as the poet knew his body was fading. I keep wanting to say that the poem refuses erasure, but it’s so much more than that; it feels like a reckoning. It wants nothing more than to be alive entirely, even as it acquiesces to the inevitable.

There is an openness of heart and imagination, a quiet yes to whatever this life adds up to. What are the ‘few things’ he wants to correct? And what are the mistakes he wants to return? This poem sounds like a man seeking wholeness, integrating what has been lost or omitted. It sounds like a man at once accepting and refusing death.

His body, though riddled with illness, remains “faithful,” and though it is “far from the glitter” it once swam in, being received by the water, now becomes the one who absorbs the water, which is not even water in its fully “liquid” form, but “the finest mist.” He writes: “But I want good tears when I stand on the street/ and, from the sky, drifts down the finest mist on my face.”

Good tears. Tears of gratitude? Tears of fullness? It’s true, we don’t get everything we want: more time, our friends all alive. But the act of “describing things to be sure they happened” is saying something important about poetry, and how for the writer it allows us to say. Yes. This happened, I happened. It’s all true. Yes.

ABOUT MATTHEW SIEGEL

Matthew Siegel is the author of Blood Work, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from University of Wisconsin-Madison. His poems and essays have appeared in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, San Francisco Chronicle, the Sun, Tin House, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he holds a B.A. from Binghamton University and an M.F.A. from University of Houston. He lives in Oakland, California with his dog Fran.